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What the HTTP is CouchApp?

couchapp.org

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Re: What the HTTP is CouchApp?

#11

Post by eftpotrm »

jchrisa wrote: post #5
petervandijck wrote: post #2

Calling the standard stack "fragile custom code" doesn't do much for their credibility here. I mean, really. Fragile?

Have you ever tried keeping a web application running? It's hard . About as close as we've gotten to doing it well is the plain-old PHP and Apache httpd stack. I've written PHP apps that stay up for years as long as I pay the bill. I was never able to get anywhere close to that reliability from other web stacks. CouchApps aim to be simpler and more reliable, so that eventually end-users can deploy and perhaps even cr…

I've built and deployed more ASP / SQL Server (or occasionally Access!) than I care to remember; I'm doing more ASP.Net now, after some time on desktop apps in between. Either way, I've never had reliability issues.

Re: What the HTTP is CouchApp?

#13

Post by JamesNK »

So have any real world applications successfully used this as a framework?

It looks interesting but I see any moderately complex web app, i.e. more than CRUD, hitting a wall of complexity when using CouchApp as a base. You eliminate so called "fragile custom code" up until the point where the framework doesn't support something and you need the custom code anyway, except now there is the overhead of getting custom code working together with everything else. At which point you wonder what was the point?

Re: What the HTTP is CouchApp?

#14

Post by pepijndevos »

"Your site can be faster than theirs, if you serve it from localhost."

Is there some arcane wisdom in here, or is this just stupidity? Sure, if I run Google on my own computer, and replicate it to my laptop, they will both be very fast... and need quantum HDs for storage.

Re: What the HTTP is CouchApp?

#17

Post by kunley »

jchrisa wrote: post #5
petervandijck wrote: post #2

Calling the standard stack "fragile custom code" doesn't do much for their credibility here. I mean, really. Fragile?

Have you ever tried keeping a web application running? It's hard . About as close as we've gotten to doing it well is the plain-old PHP and Apache httpd stack. I've written PHP apps that stay up for years as long as I pay the bill. I was never able to get anywhere close to that reliability from other web stacks. CouchApps aim to be simpler and more reliable, so that eventually end-users can deploy and perhaps even cr…

Not playing devil's advocate here, but a deep concern:

Today's world is full of programmers posing as production administrators, while the solution is to employ administrators and move on. I've seen so many production failures because of admin-posed programmers wishful thinking or not having a sufficiently broad perspective to prepare themselves for the disaster. It was regardless if it was a simple Apache+PHP, hairy Weblogic+Oracle stack or some new sexy Erlangish stuff.

I have nothing against programmers and I am both admin & programmer myself, but many (most?) coders just lack some operational perspective & experience. Is is possible that selling new solutions as "don't plan, deploy & pray" will make this trend worse?

Re: What the HTTP is CouchApp?

#19

Post by jchrisa »

kunley wrote: post #17
jchrisa wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried keeping a web application running? It's hard . About as close as we've gotten to doing it well is the plain-old PHP and Apache httpd stack. I've written PHP apps that stay up for years as long as I pay the bill. I was never able to get anywhere close to that reliability from other web stacks. CouchApps aim to be simpler and more reliable, so that eventually end-users can deploy and perhaps even cr…

Not playing devil's advocate here, but a deep concern: Today's world is full of programmers posing as production administrators, while the solution is to employ administrators and move on. I've seen so many production failures because of admin-posed programmers wishful thinking or not having a sufficiently broad perspective to prepare themselves for the disaster. It was regardless if it was a simple Apache+PHP, hairy…

The important thing to keep in mind is that by "deploy" I mean "install" -- the goal is to make CouchApps as easy to share / replicate / install on end-user devices like cellphones and laptops.

Once you have a fully replicating application, you want to run it as close to the user as possible to avoid network latency. I don't think the deployment challenges of large centralized apps will go away, but there are a lot of apps that better fit the decentralized model.

Now that CouchDB makes decentralized web apps possible, we'll get to see what can be done.

Re: What the HTTP is CouchApp?

#20

Post by jchrisa »

aneth wrote: post #9

Not sure how I feel about exposing my database directly to a client. This means all security regarding reading and writing any data must be handled in CouchDB. Not knowing about CouchDB, the existence of CouchApp leads me to believe there must be some way to do this, but I can't see how this would be possible with MySQL or Postgres. Cell level security in a database? Hmm.

CouchDB's security is per-database (since you assume you will be replicating a complete database to the end-user, the concept of cell-level security doesn't make sense).
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